Kenny Tutt tells The Staff Canteen about his debut restaurant, Pitch, and plans to launch a cookery school

Masterchef 2018 winner Kenny Tutt is set to open his first restaurant in his hometown of Worthing, Sussex.

The restaurant will open around the third week of May. It will span two floors, with plans to introduce a cookery school on the top floor in June or July.

In an interview with The Staff Canteen, Kenny Tutt said that the restaurant's name, Pitch, was inspired his parents’ market trading background. 

“My mum had a seafood stand and we would go around different places around London and Sussex and she would always get up about four in the morning to try and find the very best pitch," he said.

“I always just remember the fruit and veg sellers and the butchers and I just fell in love with at that point and that's when I fell in love with food and the way it brings people together."

Pitch will serve Modern British food, which the chef said is “whatever you want it to be, because the UK is such a boiling pot, you can play with so many  concepts and flavours.”

“It’s just about taking things like ham, egg and chips or jam roly poly and making it the best that it can be.”

His doughnuts will be filled with whipped goats’ cheese, toasted hazelnut & thyme jam; his take on ham, egg and chips will be a Sussex ham hock served with shirred eggs, chips and gooseberry chutney, and what he calls chocolate cereal will in fact be cereal panna cotta with peanut butter, a chocolate pretzel crackle and chocolate yogurt sorbet.

Pitch won’t stick to strictly local produce, as, the chef said, “the quality of the sometimes trumps the locality of it,” but, inspired by his time working with Tommy Banks at The Black Swan, the chef hopes to eventually grow herbs, botanicals, and as much produce as possible on site, “keeping with that market feel, where it’s accessible and you’ve got stuff growing around you.”

Meanwhile, the Pitch Cookery School, on the top floor above the restaurant, will offer cookery classes and give people the chance to understand the operation of a professional kitchen.

Since he won MasterChef last year,  Kenny said, he has most enjoyed intervening in schools and teaching cooking across the country. “For me it encompasses everything from science to maths to communication, and it really helps people.”

“So I thought, we’ve got this lovely space, why don’t we offer the opportunity to come and learn some of the basics, and we’ll get other chefs that I’ve worked with in too, it just felt like a natural thing to do."

By Tanwen Dawn-Hiscox